Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Assorted links on Chinese Urbanization

  1. Urban China in 30 frames. Here. (via Moving Cities)
  2. The new issue of the Journal of Transport and Land Use (JLUT) focuses on China. Here!

  3. Dan Steinbock on Chinese urbanization and labor force supply. Here.

    excerpt: "The urbanization that took almost a century in the West is occurring in a decade or two in China. In 1979, Shenzhen was still a poor fishing village with some 20,000 inhabitants. In 2009, it had a population of 9 million, and income per capita exceeded $13,600, only $3,000 less than in Taiwan or South Korea."

  4. Lisa Gu on possible urban decentralization in China. Here.
    excerpt: "The shifts in the value of a hokou parallels another interesting shift: many migrant workers are returning to their hometowns much earlier. In the previous years, migrant workers would usually return home right before Lunar Chinese New Year, which typically falls in February, but a large number of them have started to return home in December this year. // The driving factor behind this change is that the cost of living in the cities has risen so dramatically over the past few years, and the money migrant workers earn barely covers their living costs. // Although China’s urbanization will likely continue, the patterns might increasingly be to smaller cities and towns. In this sense, China’s development may, sooner than any expected, begin to take on the dispersion pattern that has occurred in the Western countries for more than a half century.